her youth haggard with apprehension and pain, the
prefigurement of the agony of birth, gazed, dumb
and bitter in her sacrifice, at the graceful, cold figure
that, as irrevocably as herself, denied all that
Lettice affirmed, desired all that she feared and
hated.

"Why, that's bad, Gordon," she reiterated, "I'm
your wife. And Miss Beggs is bad, I'm certain of
that." A spasm of suffering crossed her face like a
cloud.

"You ought not to have come, Lettice. Lettice,
you ought not to have come," he told her. His dull
voice reflected the lassitude that had fallen upon him,
the sudden death of all emotion, the swift extinguishing
of his interest in the world about him; it reflected,
in his indifference to desire, an indifference
to Meta Beggs.

"Do you love her, Gordon?" his wife asked.

"No, I don't," he answered, perceptibly impatient
at the question.

"Do you like her better than you like me?"

The palpable answer to her query, that he thought
of himself more than either, evaded him. "I don't
like her better than I like you," he repeated baldly.

Lettice turned to the other woman. "There's not
much you can say," she declared, "caught like this
trying to steal somebody's husband. And you set
over a school of children!"

[[259]]

p258 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p259w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p260

v?